


Tanning Booth

by 11dishwashers



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: High School AU, M/M, Summer AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 10:13:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14018016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/11dishwashers/pseuds/11dishwashers
Summary: Dongyoung falls into enchantment easily, and honestly, it keeps the whole summer job thing quite interesting.





	Tanning Booth

"He's my cousin's whatever, I don't really know," the customer said to Dongyoung, who nodded though to be truthful to himself as much as anyone else, he didn't have a damn to spare- not tucked away for later use or expended within a radius that it could be raked back by means of persistence. His magnetic repellent in the form of disinterest had amounted to a joke around the salon, that Dongyoung didn't fraternize with the array of frat boy coworkers. If he wouldn't go out of his way to talk to his live-ins, he made it a point that he * _ would _ * go out of the way to avoid customers just as much; there was something about the snotty trails and goose chases that formed in small talk, and really he felt it was impersonal while missing the point of why that might be the point in the first place, and there would always be some recurring motifs with weather discussion and how spray tan could be used to gain satan's complexion. Again with the spray tan. "But yeah, he told me I'd get skin cancer. So I'm here now," the customer laughed and swiped the token up off the counter, though Dongyoung hadn't instructed him to do so. 

He stewed there for the rest of the hours before lunch as his brain cells writhed beneath the disgusting smell of what wasn't antiseptic, but shared such acute properties with it that he mixed them up when he forgot where he was. He wouldn't wake up in a hospital ward, windows open for the air and closed for the greater good, tv wheeled out to him on a metal trolley- this was his line of work, however absurdly shallow, a mannequin for the tanning salon's front that moved without popped plastic joints and the rounds of ball gags. It was obvious why he was chosen; having developed no fortés in the realm of social aptitude, it was a given that whatever appeal he casted was all on account of his looks. It made him feel great. Leafing through a DIY garden scaping catalogue, the flowers bloomed in the light of his eyes, or an otherwise arrogant use of imagery. He pushed the sunglasses up his nose and leaned back on his swivel chair even though he knew that he probably shouldn't. There were lightboxes fitted behind the reception desk, each shelf lined by product that was only toxic when ingested, neon colours in reflection of the sheen with which they sat upon the skin. He'd yet to use any, though their supplementary boss Byulyi was oftentimes one to push the glossing of a face tan on him, withholding some belief that Dongyoung's grievances in regards to tanning had been about the density of it on his skin rather than the visibility of its streakiness with his * _ stupidly _ * pale form. Just the face and neck, she'd said. He'd objected that the summer heat was already cracking its way through the cement roads, and that it was a lost cause to start wearing monastery outfits to work that covered him from neck to toe, as he'd sooner lose that facet of his mannequin self than suffocate within layers of whatever, all for the lines running down his nose when he'd inevitably rub the tan off his skin, an accident in nature and a reversion to his roots as a ghost. Whatever, twerp, she'd said with her eyes scrunched up, that same glitter palette dragged across her upper waterlines- I guess we can't deal with the high schoolers if you do tan, anyway. 

He hadn't understood what she meant. She herself was a looker, and looked with a great jostle of giddiness. It was hard to tell if this was her prime, but if it had yet to be fixed to her features, it was an obvious line of events that men would begin burning themselves to a crisp to pass her by as she lead girls to separate corridors in her double tonged sandals, removed from the flip flop family for the sole reason that their straps were molded from leather. By the end of it, Dongyoung would begin clearing ashes from the space between ultraviolet bars when he should've been cleaning leaves off the skim of a pool- he thought he'd look good with the net being churned by his hands, maybe a glimmer of a natural tan with his weirdly long swim shorts pulled up past his waist. It had remained surreal in passing for all of the past two weeks now, but he couldn't believe he was working in a tanning salon. Previously, it had seemed to be a place scraped from fiction mould, a nowhere pulled out of a hat for rich Europeans who lived in Prague or other terraforms ridden with snow. Well. Where there was an insecurity, there was a market. The bouts of unhappiness were easy to fix if one lived that idealistic, almost shunned 'material girl' approach to life, and thus tan-happy people with fattened wallets and hastily planned workout regimes and vitamins and fast cars and hollow structures came to simmer away an hour. 

He hadn't been expecting anyone, as there wasn't a great quantity of customers to expect. In retrospect, he felt with immense surprise, jittery shock with that edge of anticipation, that Donghyuck had shown up at all.It was a chamber of boringness, a dead end in the suburbs. Anyone under the age of twenty who showed up was already following the footsteps of their future selves, a lucid bout of sleep paralysis through a midlife crisis; people over the age of twenty were to be expected and somewhere, a case was closed because of this. Donghyuck was a seventeen year old whose age was apparent. Dongyoung felt the same as he did with the frames of all his sunglasses digging into his cranium, perhaps causing blood loss to his scalp as they stretched, hair making room for the early stages of baldness in a classroom in a high school. They hardly belonged. It was with great surprise that Dongyoung had checked Donghyuck out, first a scan up then a dressing down. Donghyuck may have been Donghyuck throughout his entire life, but if we were to take Dongyoung's limited perspective- both fairly and otherwise- he hadn't really became so until two minutes later, not until he was knighted into the age unity by the royal sanction of Dongyoung's Ego Apologists. 

"Is this a tanning- place?" he'd said. It wouldn't be out of the code of conduct to laugh in his face right now, Dongyoung figured, there must be a workaround when customers didn't display the necessary allocation of brain cells to make it through the doors in the first place. * _ Of fucking course it's a tanning salon _ * seemed appropriate but a bit mean spirited. Outside, their sign was baby blue with 'Tanning Cove' decaled across it in block letters, captured in eternal gaudiness by virtue of their holographic paint, and there were sixty thousand loose parts of tan photoshoots steamrolled onto the window, on the inside so that the light was at its dying breath when it made it through the ink amo. Dongyoung could barely read his magazines most of the time, which was at worst an obscene ask of him(this being to work without a fix of distraction, no fillers or anything) and at worst a blindness perpetrator. Sometimes he put his hands in front of his face to gauge his own eyesight, how much it was decaying by reading in dim light. It would make sense to opt towards photograph based bi-monthlies, but the thought of leafing through a stack of airproof product placements in shackles by his low attention span, good god it was hell on earth- of course he'd sooner go blind, wasn't that a given?

"Yeah," he said, though he shouldn't have to tell people these things in the first place. To him it seemed that the photos were there for a reason, and if it couldn't command the attention from a stranger or even a dapper with a hand out in the dark, then the victims of eyesore must have gone through life without extracting anything from visual cues, and none of the responsibility from years of missing the margins should be bestowed upon someone as young and impressionable and young as him. 

"So there are... tanning beds?" the boy shifted his weight from foot to foot, then almost hopped on his left side. He had this huge sports kit bag that was making a fool out of him, weighed down by a rifted strap that pulled muscle from the bone through the weight it had grown into, and along the sides of it were strips of shiny white material, almost a fabric born from the ashes of a cling film roll, looped to the point of brainwash. He was a head below Dongyoung in height, an obvious metric without requiring any verification should they both bother to stand ass to ass and discuss into the void of uselessness- obviously some form of gymnast, it seemed all the clues lended their weight in the proceedings towards this theory.His type was common place within even the confinements of Dongyoung's household, having grown up with the scraps of a personality shot up to the stars, his brother announcing that his callusis was almost the colour of piss in a moment of grand reservations, a gymnast being ushered through all the grade returns where academics manifested themselves into. For Gongmyung's high school years, he'd been told it was okay to possess morbid stupidity as long as he could represent the team in basketball. Similarly in the inverted whites, Dongyoung was being told quite the opposite, though he believed with good intentions that one day he'd stumble upon a gem of a talent and it'd crash the foundations of his value- or, he was counting on this. He knew what these sport types were like as they holed themselves into every takeaway dinner the Kim family ordered as Gongmyung claimed they were the best of friends. It seemed to Dongyoung that most of such pleasantries were sustained on the playing field, and when off the benefits could still be reaped. He didn't want, or need, extra curricular friends, and he took it as sheer coincidence that he couldn't net them if he tried. This guy probably had the same sorts of coworkers molded into familiarity without much of a say in things.

"Yeah," Dongyoung said, moving so he was leaned up in an obvious display of his height and the fact that it rendered him as bigger. There was something about the presence of other people his age that shot him with the urge to intimidate or scare, and thus it seemed a necessary course to take to flaunt his height; he knew it was one of his most striking attributes from afar, and when up close it'd have to go to clear skin while grease ripples were banished. He didn't let himself think about what this guy thought of him. It was easier when he saw the customers for what they were- people without any place in his life, only present so he could get moderate pay for a seventeen year old in the summer, and then he could go to the drugstore and buy a whole shelf of icing pastries, get sick in the upstairs bathroom. "There are tanning beds. Are you over the age of thirteen?"

The boy faltered for a moment, obviously offended even though Dongyoung was under the impression that his rudeness was strict in its detachedness and an obvious flaw. "Are you calling me stupid?" he said, almost embarrassed. 

Dongyoung sighed all righteous. "I'm required  _ *by law _ * to ask you if you're over thirteen."

"Obviously I am," the boy said. 

"Not that obvious..." Dongyoung scribbled something meaningless into the margins of his sportswear magazine. It was at the leisure section, wherein a nameless journalist was interviewing the hostess of a dietary clinic that went by the alias of a weekly bath of sophistication and finery. A picture of a blonde white woman was superimposed over the page, the text curving to fit around the folds of her ugly blue dress, and he checked out of job requirements for at least three seconds to draw a mustache on her, wriggly and caterpillar-esque. The concept of small scale vandalism added some bliss to his existence, and eased his worries that he'd run out of things to pool over during what had shaped up to be a receptionist job. If he had known he wasn't the one to supervise the tanning beds and the cancer wearing into people's skin, the distributing of floor shoes and bulk bought 'fashion sunglasses', he was sure he'd take up his uncle's offer to work in the Footlocker around the block instead. It wouldn't be easier but there was nothing less fulfilling than a slow death by method of desk placement, and he faced out towards the glass door where the sun was still fixed above shoebox flat roofs and the irregular clouded steam. It made for an eyesore and a slog. Before him, the boy moved his weight from leg to leg, knees oddly sculpted below some forgettable cargo shorts. 

"I'm sixteen," he was saying, nervous at the prospect that Dongyoung might be older, however inevitable. The inevitable always presented itself in the end and thus, Dongyoung had his hand forced into a newfound air of condescension towards his * _ junior _ *- sixteen and flailing about for some tanning bed. Usually, he couldn't find it in himself to care when customers were making bad decisions in regards to their appearance, but it was never a good track to develop a tanning addiction at an age in and around the boy's; he'd seen it happen before within the borrowed richers of the lot, intentionally forgetting their sunglasses for a chance at a natural dash of brown along the eyelids. It's detrimental to a look, Byulyi would say with all the conduct of a person who possesses a degree in their field. The only thing she possessed was the other female employee, Jungeun, in the hopes of developing a shorter version of herself to streamline workbred arguments. 

The boy had filled his name into the planner as Donghyuck, and was adamant in regards to the use of a tanning bed rather than a spray tan committed by professionals. "Is there more privacy in the beds?" he'd asked as his hand ran over the corkboard, hacking forward an attempt in seeming like he cared about the notices. Most of them were months out of date and counted towards about zero increase in awareness about their information, but Dongyoung often found a place to reside when he picked the tacks out of the bottom corners of leaflets and pierced the paper until his index finger could no longer snap back into place, until he was a lobster boy with claw hands and an artificial clip. 

"We prohibit jacking off in the beds, if that's what you're asking," Dongyoung said and smiled at how vulgar it was. Not that wanking was the most unfounded topic amongst his herd of age friends, but rather he'd brought it up in front of this weirdo Donghyuck who'd only just about simmered out of a panic attack in their earlier discussion of how the cradles work. Ultraviolets was the general consensus, though neither of them had immense knowledge on the subject. For Dongyoung, it certainly wasn't enough to justify his filling in of the position possible experts could take instead. He was sure that if Byulyi hadn't put forward his name in goodwill and good reminiscence on account of their lack of ability to find anyone else(possibly, a lack of drive too), it must've been because his resumé spoke with its hands unbound, proclaimed an assortment of fake credentials and then a bordered list of all of his finals grades. He was a * _ lot _ * of stupid things, but he was far from stupid, and it was only a matter of time until all the idiocy was engulfed by everything else and he was grabbing the Tanning Cove by its stock, should he care enough to do so, or should he even have the courage of conviction that would lead him down such an ambitious path of business ventures. 

Donghyuck sputtered and for a moment, it even swayed his movements of intentional distraction and his hand went flat at his side. "I wasn't- you know I wasn't talking about * _ that _ *," he said, looking back over his shoulder; his eyes were narrowed at Dongyoung, though Dongyoung had thought with such wide sockets it'd be impossible to decrease their span across the face in the first write off. They were a bit unnerving within certain interpretations and semblances, as on the one hand they were bright like a girl's and then two seconds later when his head turned a vision of a killer came to mind, loopy with scales shifted below the retina, unattractively filled with life in that the state of living was a passion rather than an indefinite given. He wasn't ugly, though he was very much his age. His hair patted downwards with sweat from whatever club he'd bristled out of, with ideas as absurd as fake tan on skin that was already, by all means, an ideal and a role model. Dongyoung leaned across his desk but found he couldn't quite reach the switch, and thus had to make a show of himself by standing up to turn it on. The electric fan made slicing noises accompanied by similar motions. The air wasn't kind on his skin; not in feeling, but he made do and settled back into the chair, thinking about how wonderful it was that at the end of the day, his bed never had the legs to move from being a pillar of expectancy. It'd be right there in his room, duvets askew with such mildness that his mother would be pissed. Why was life so merciful all the time? "I'm just wondering. I don't like to, uh..."

"It's not a nudist colony, we do have rules about public indecency here. Just put your clothes on if you're tanning more than once. The robes are free additions but  _ *believe me _ *, they're itchy," Dongyoung said. Really, it didn't make any marginal sense that Donghyuck was so insecure that his fears of appearing ugly to the inanimate interior of the beds were very real, considering how confident he had first come across. There were people like that, but usually they were somewhat correct in their insecurities- all derived from truths the mirror had tipped them off towards. Dongyoung saw none of this, though admittedly, he wasn't looking so much as glancing. He drew a garter down the thighs of another catalogue model. This time the lines were too angular, long enough that it lost the sex appeal. His brain swore at his inability to draw despite the amount of practice he should be getting a day, all things considered, but his hand just moved the biro to the face of a suit model, drawing a 420 face tattoo along his cheekbones. Satisfied, he put the pen down and looked back at Donghyuck, who was looking at him with the girly mode activated. Hand on his heart, Dongyoung would've been fine with dwindling down this whole weirdass-boy-his-age debacle without company, as this was all that he'd come to extract from a week in office and low end conglomerates with one foot in a welcomed credential and the other in tired dog shit, no one to bother him as he spent his time wallowing- but in that moment a phantom had overthrown the electioneer cells flooding his head up to the nines with an ink, a red; he felt the sharpest turn in a stomach he kept locked away for conservation purposes, for himself in a security breach rather than an omission of 'beyond reasonable doubt'. "So do you want a token?"

"Yeah, I guess," Donghyuck had laid his arm across the counter, prepped for an injection of some sort that Dongyoung wasn't going to provide. Perhaps a jab at the intrusion of himself speaking, what he perceived as embarrassing, annoying, or a jagged bullclip on the wrist for nothing at all, or an impression of utmost desirability in essence rather than capture; he wanted to look casual, not quite boast that he was confident enough to lean into the desk with obvious expectations from Dongyoung. Outside, it had began to rain; light and orange with the summer. Dongyoung pushed the token over. It was cool on his fingertips, and it reminded him that the chill inspired within his bones was on account of the electric fan. He'd bugged Byulyi about aircon for enough time to force her to develop a personal vendetta against all cool air, and had said she'd speak to their joined boss, greyfaced by the shadows and unavailable assumedly due to his importance, high up on the food chain that his weight was stressed to those who'd never laid ghost upon him in their career's livelihood. Nothing came of this, of course, and the conspiracy that Byulyi had no contact with him whatsoever strengthened just like that. "I mean, thanks," Donghyuck said, then picked the token up between two fingers with unjustifiable anxiety. Towards its existence, he shuttered into paleness. How inconvenient, Dongyoung thought. 

"No problem."

When Donghyuck exited stage left, Dongyoung stood up once more and switched off the fan. A coldness had descended upon the room just then in any case. 

  
  
  


Dongyoung was shooting the bull with a coworker from some upstate, foliage ridden residence when Donghyuck had showed up for the second time. For a moment the notion of Donghyuck subjecting himself to something that(bluntyly) didn't seem to manifest itself in his confidence surprised him, but then he worked past it by some grander divinity. He figured that he didn't know this kid at all. It had taken a little over ten minutes for his name to be in someone's mouth after he left, and that was only when their other slave labour stand in Jungwoo had called him 'really weird'; * _ like, he kept asking all these stupid questions. One minute I'd be there timing his fuckin "session _ "-* he'd paused in this moment to mimic Byulyi's signature hand gesture; a tug at the roots of her hair and then her hands clasped together for some job interview that never commenced- * _ and the next he'd be like, how orange will I be on a scale of one to ten? Like christ, I don't know! I barely know what I'm doing anyway! You should get away from me, really _ *. It must've been forelined in the old testament, for Donghyuck hadn't been caked with ash and the reek of cremation upon grand entrance. All of this wasn't exaggeration- distantly, Dongyoung was aware of how bad Jungwoo was with the entire ordeal of maintaining a job for more than necessary, more than enough time for any figure of authority with more than six seconds of breathing experience could flip the veil and expose Jungwoo's general swing of nonconformity(if he was a chameleon, he'd be smited by a food chain superior with not even a chance of disguising himself behind a shade of mud), and it seemed that there was only a matter of time until the Tanning Cove had a skin cancer based lawsuit on its robes. 

Donghyuck was more than a possible victim of this, as Jungwoo had gone on to exaggerate his supposed obnoxiousness through a series of nasally monologues. Then, these were followed by more retakes and renditions, and finally somewhat monstrous portrayals, all distorted to the point where the person he was attempting to imitate couldn't * _ possibly _ * be real. 

"Shut up," the uptown coworker was saying, though it didn't seem like she meant it with any measure of a fracture. She brought an forearm up to rub her forehead and the sleeve of her hoodie bunched oddly at her elbow. "There's a  _ customer _ ."

Dongyoung essentially didn’t care, but he let on that he did; caring was a theatrical baton act in any case, as it only seemed to exist when its netting had the prominity to be pointed at and noted, and that was determined by the one who harboured it in the first place. Possibly a restraint on displays of empathy was more effort than anything else. He liked to float with whatever seemed to be socially adept in these situations, and thus he faced the door without any extension of invites, felt the disconnect ruffle between the uptown coworker and him. Before today, it could be said that he'd barely caught wind of her- no doubt their schedules were coincided without the elaborate gaps in work, and she was the type to find prosperity in keeping to herself and politeness in loosening from their machine's framework. However, she'd been in the front all day as Byulyi took some liberties with the distribution of work loads. A rookie was being taught 'the ropes' by her, within. 

Donghyuck stepped in when the sun had reached its brightest low in the sky. As he moved, more of the yellow light slipped off each contour of his face, however subliminal. There was no kit bag or regularity; no boring cargo shorts or semblance of any punctures by the tanning booth. It might as well have been the first time Dongyoung laid eyes on him. To be honest, the Tanning Cove had forked its way through whatever slew of geeks that'd die in the name of looking good, and had since began to ravel up the lines- translucent in ghost lighting- with hooks hot pokered through a generic crowd of men and women that Dongyoung had trouble finding the time, or care, to remember. The men kept themselves well in a show of mutual respect towards their gravitating gymbunnies, and the women wore white swimsuits with the occasional lacework on the rims of the neckline. Donghyuck was a boy, he was a grey in a sea of greys, but still it was different, if only due to his youth and the manner in which the grey choked the life out of him. He had those eyes too, the kind that collectors would gouge out by the way they fascinated and hosted the horror shows. To Dongyoung, it had never been a matter of beauty. 

"Back so soon?" the uptown coworker was saying, as though she had actually seen him last time. During his overture, she'd been flipping covers and tokens in the women's corridor or playing up to her downwards strengths, and this was always the case for her without exception. Jungwoo must've been utilising his indifference towards any sort of drama and throwing forth another display of what he'd gathered from Donghyuck's weird mannerisms. Dongyoung could see it now- Jungwoo, mouth ajar to the point of catching an overhead spider, a quick pat of cobwebs that dissolved along saliva runnings, and what's this about  _ *being so orange?*  _

"I guess I am," Donghyuck said, perhaps in another attempt at his insecurity ridden indifference. He ran the collar of his t shirt between two fingers, a crease dampened with ease, and paused before the counter as if in silent evaluation of its shoe gloss, all worked into the miniscule scratches caused by those of the cast with manicures and french tips in their repertoires. He kept his eyes just above both of their heads when he spoke with confidence- otherwise, it was in search of that different brand of evaluation, as he'd never been no brand loyalist, no stupor that got beat down with heavy hail, and Dongyoung's noteworthy lack of interest would decay before it could reach the extra mile, in Donghyuck's eyes. It would end in an abrupt pitter and certainly not with any leeway for petering. 

Dongyoung threaded his lines beneath the catalogue woman's nose so the ink resembled a mustache. When he looked up, he found it was with a great ordeal that amounted to nothing in particular- the show had plunged into a static chapter of sophomore blues and was in the production of a wrap up, but it besotted him that there might be something in this kid that had gone unrecognised, as beside Dongyoung the uptown coworker was quick to develop a transfixion. The heat had clung to the city all day and left residue and artifacts of its takeover in all the buildings, ushered through the doors behind human beings, yet still she wore a hoodie after a botched spray tan. Her forearms supposedly resembled those of a burn victim's. This statement belonging to her mouth, as well as the hand that fed it in indirect spreading of gossip- Jungwoo, who else? All afternoon, she'd gone to great lengths to stir this supposed dynamic between her and Jungwoo, in the name of an obvious picking at romance, away from the brittle until it was separate and stringy and not quite there, but still somewhat, and that was enough for her. "Here," Dongyoung said, sliding the token over. "Don't come here too much, seriously."

She nodded. "It's dangerous. Sometimes, it can crack your skin-" in retrospect, the fact that this was a statement pulled from her was an odd spark of origins, unfitting and beseating. Her skin was clear and sometimes damp. Through an offset cast by her pretty nose and the balance it enacted along her face, this trait had lost all inherentness of bad means, and none of it worked against her or came at her with an axe. To gaze upon her was to gaze upon a girl formed in the lapse of skillfully filigreed gel. "Like your lips and stuff. It really makes some people look old."

"Don't let Byulyi hear you say that," Dongyoung said, which made her laugh in an embarrassing excess. It took a whole six seconds for her hand to stop thrumming on the table, twinged by electrocution. Something in his chest ruptured, but if he was honest with himself as much as he was with others, it wasn't a gravitational pull that he'd mistaken for a case of the hiccups, and he knew that under the legislations of the law such a thing was fickle in the hands of the teenagers, but again he was sure he didn't have a crush on her- nor did he want to, really. However, when humour was throttled onto the scene by him and the crops sprung up, it lit him up a shameful amount. His brother called him a comedian sometimes, but he meant it as more of an insult. How depressing. He wrinkled his nose and felt disappointed by how quickly he'd pulled himself from the heights. 

"She'd flip," she was inclined to agree. Then, turned to Donghyuck as a motif of decor, she pulled at the corners of her mouth until her face had almost cooperated itself into a smile. Dongyoung's hardware on offer was faulty- it never quite slipped into the expressions he'd been hoping to achieve when the time for motor functions was small. He was jealous of the smile, for whatever aforementioned reason. Her gums were weird and bloodshot, so it couldn't be for any aesthetic purpose- not the toxins wrapped up on her crows, enamelled and slipped by a layer of sepia. 

While she was smiling, Donghyuck had been turning the token over and over in his hands, though nothing ever changed in regards to its appearance. HIs hands faltered at the silence and a trace of discomfort slipped below the surface level. "Thanks," he said too loud, too much like Jungwoo on a day of glass gossip, fresh and rose scented. Dongyoung pressed his lips together until they both disappeared. It was hard not to wonder what about the atmosphere was so hard with ice, but his skin was on the verge of declawing from the pulses to cover his face out of what wasn't even secondhand embarrassment. 

Neither of them said no problem. 

 

When it came time to walk home, Dongyoung had been under the impression that a stroll through the lovely weather would replicate the wonders of modern medicine along the tension of his spine. All day the transparent panel on the door was hot and annoyingly bright, and he'd wanted to believe that this could be a good thing; for his days in recognising and anticipating forks and storms he had yet to shun aside a happiness buzz when it rained, yet there was something in him that said summer wasn't meant to be spent grey. Jungwoo was adamant in cramming his stupid golden retriever mannerisms into everything he did this year. He'd waited outside Dongyoung's porch for a whole * _ hour _ * on the first day of June, and of course the household had noticed this without ever taking the time to tell Dongyoung. When he'd stepped out the door, Jungwoo had been pointing the plastic nozzle of a water gun at him. * _ This is a stick up* _ , he'd said, tongue flicking wherever unnecessary. In each room, it seemed his gut craved an influence over the head count's heads, and thus he was pulling some movements to get Dongyoung all upbeat and carefree in time for a July road trip that he seemed to, honest through each spool of his combover, believe was going to happen. Him and his girlfriend and Dongyoung and ‘maybe Yuta, if they could rope him into it’.

It hadn't been hard to admit that this picturesque bath of ideals- no, a painting, a masterpiece by the guises of bowed artist caps, the lone sound of a car burning down one lane country roads, a slight offcourse and the headlights would flicker out long after the passengers had given up the ghost- had began to hold Dongyoung's brain hostage by lock and key, perhaps with subliminal brainwashing. Or even a quick therapy that had gone down to consist of an MK Ultra based undergoings, and he'd had his memory wiped of such events. Nothing seemed to be out of the realm of possibility for the methods with which Jungwoo played out for the things he desired. Dongyoung was a tool in this, down to the pace he walked home, slow and deliberate while avoiding cracks in the colourblocked sections of the pavement. The air was hot and sticky; maybe he should've been glad of its sympathetic curves, but it wasn't in character of him to view things with such personal, bullshit semantics. Sympathetic- hah. What a joke. For the entire month of May, it had been much of the same thing; same overabundance of mercury, same dress code, same faces slunk out of school, offputting in the natural habitats of teenage girls with tube tops and tennis shoes and same teenage boys with frightfully pretentious polo shirts, salmon when ironed with care. One could only expect June to carry the baton straight down the parallel lines. If not, he could count himself lucky. Pools all over the state were trashed with grease and hair pulled from the folds of swimming hats unconsciously, and none of the sights would be direct from the sun. He'd always swam at the olympics pool anyway, backstroke with his eyes trained on the fans of the steel ceiling, goggles spoiled with chlorine beads that ran down the slant of his nose when he tipped his head forwards. 

**Author's Note:**

> you can find my twitter @11dishwashers ! :) sorry this is awful and i hate it lol


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